About the Streams

My personal homepage organizes various bits of my on-line identity, under one "top-level" roof. In particular, I like to organize various aspects of my life in terms of on-going streams of information.

I realize what is posted here is pretty much available for the world to see. As I value some aspects of my and other's privacy, I've decided against posting various things, particularly images of other people (see below). While I'm sure that mining the information on this site will reveal more than I intended, I do hope that I'm not in for any unforseen surprises. I also hope that at least some of the information on my site will be useful or of interest to others. Please contact me, if you have any questions or comments.

More information on specific streams follows below.

Twitter Feed

This is fairly new. I basically use it to condense and package all the other streams below.

Textstream & Textstream2

Mostly, my text stream contains links with a small amount of annotation to things I found interesting. Sometimes I excerpt a relevant bit of the text. I don't think this needs much explaining. It's mostly my way of organizing lots of tidbits in the tumblelog tradition and is not meant to be that comprehensible. I do like to write letters to the editor and short essays that I also put here. Many of these are done with Dov Greenbaum, and we collaboratively post them to textstream2. More bits of my textual output are listed here.

Linkstream

This is just a raw daily posting of all the links that I post to del.icio.us . Often I provide a bit of annotation of these links, so the distinction between a short blog post and a link entry disappears.

Image streams

These are a variety of images that I've found amusing. They come from a variety of sources.

Photostream (from flickr)

Some of the images are original creations -- i.e. all the images on my photostream and in lots of my (semi-private) photo galleries. Mostly, all of these images are of inanimate objects or myself . "Why such a selection?" you might ask. Basically, I do not like putting pictures of people on the web without explicit permission from them. I find the idea of people's pictures ending up on the web and then being freely traded and moved around without their permission a bit distasteful. Of course, I do have photo galleries of friends and family, but these are kept under password protection. I only put up photos of myself because I can obviously consent to their posting and of interesting objects of inanimate things which really don't care about being posted on the web. In particular, I find the practice of people innocently taking someone's picture at an informal setting and then that person finding that picture has been put up on the web for all to see very disconcerting. I have numerous times had the situation of being in a rather unpresentable state and then discovered that someone took a picture of me and posted it on the web. This has also happened to a number of colleagues of mine. (They have even been shocked to find pictures of themselves on the beach, clad scantily in swimsuits!)

Scrapbook (Clipstream)

This is fairly old and mostly defunct. However, for the record: my scrapbook blog and some of "fun" galleries contains various iconified images that I've found. Theses are clipped and scanned from various magazines (a rough citation is usually given) or just cached from various on-line sources. Usually the picture is significantly reduced to an icon like size for the purpose of display. In a sense it's quoted very much in the way Google will provide a thumbnail when you do a search. Some of these clippings have been significantly modified or processed to create various effects -- e.g. marked up in mashups. My clipstream is purely for my amusement (forming a kind of diary) and is not intended to be used in a commercial fashion. I can take down any of images upon request. I have largely discontinued this of late, resorting to just posting links to FunImages.